Kamchatka in the Time of COVID19 – Lost in Translation

14 April 2020

Yesterday (13 April), Tanya woke with a scratchy throat.  When she telephoned me as usual in the morning, she said she still planned to go skiing, what did I think about joining her?  I said I would go, wearing a mask in the car while/when we are close.  I also thought and said that I very much doubted it was coronavirus, given how careful we have been and how few documented cases there are in the city (that is, 10 total as of today).  We parked at our friends' dacha; Olya came out and presented us with cloth masks she had sewn, wishing us a good ski. 

The "big marsh" on a recent day (a crustier day).  Photo by Tanya Pinegina.  Tracks by Jody and Tanya

The previous day (12 April) we had skied hard and long on a newly groomed x-country trail, including a lot of hills, so on this day we decided--partly because of how Tanya felt--that we would take it easy and do a long loop around the big marsh. 

The conditions were perfect – a skiable surface crust, what in Russian is called "nast" (наст) (pronounced nahst) – on this particular day a relatively soft but firm, fast snow surface, with about an inch (2 cm) of new snow on top of older crust. In these conditions, when I skate-ski on a broad, flat surface, I feel like I am flying.

After our loop we had some time to explore the nearby birch forest, as usual looking for new and unusual animal tracks. We found some grouse (глухарь) tracks (no photo), and Tanya traced them back to a tree where a small deposit of grouse scat was in evidence.  Last week we saw two grouse (well, Tanya saw two, she flushed them inadvertently, I saw one). And last year we found a concentration of scat and had an online “guess who made this poop” contest on Facebook (post of 27 April 2019).  

The kind of scat a grouse or ptarmigan leaves (left, Tanya photo, 2019), and a couple example photos of them from the web.

Last night, I woke up with a very dry mouth and in a bit of a sweat.  I started obsessing about how Tanya and/or I could possibly have gotten coronavirus.  I kept trying to reason with myself – the dry mouth was from an anxiety dream, the sweat from the overheated flat, but … it took me quite awhile to go back to sleep.  No symptoms this morning, which still doesn’t say everything.

Lost in Translation part 1

Today 14 April, we are not skiing, as Tanya works to recover from what is pretty clearly a common cold.  So I am cleaning the flat and doing some cooking.  The latter became imperative when I realized that my onions were going soft and slimy, or “gooby” in my own vernacular.

How to salvage onions and potatoes, part 1 -- a stove-top frittata, before flipping, then flipped, and then plated.  Thanks to Maria Ortuño Candela for the lesson some years ago in Spain on the Costa del Sol!

I usually have shopped by myself in my years of months on Kamchatka.  I wrote a blog about some of my experiences shopping here, and what it's like in general: Kamchatka shopping adventures

Shopping is easier now than it was in my early visits (late 1990s ff.). I have learned more Russian food words, and in recent years there are many large stores with shelves out in the open.  Previously, foodstuffs were behind counters, and you needed 1) to ask for it, 2) to go pay at a cashier, and 3) to bring back the receipt to get your item(s).  I remember my very first shopping excursion back in 1998, by myself, when mostly I just pointed and said “eta” ["this", or "that"].  Later, Tanya told me it was all over the neighborhood that a foreigner had shopped in this little market.

When I shop by myself among open shelves, I can take time -- sometimes a LONG time -- to try to read labels and ingredients.  Usually I manage with the basics.  I want to know that my juice does not have sugar in it, for example.  Most food I know the names of, in Russian.  I rarely use a dictionary.  But sometimes I fail. Even with Tanya around.
     [but not with toilet paper, shown here, --though how soft? how many layers? recycled paper?....]

One store, mid-March -- two displays of t.p.

As of about a month ago, due to coronavirus concerns, I stopped shopping on a frequent basis.  Instead, I have gone every ~2 weeks with Tanya in her car and loaded up on supplies, enough for two weeks plus.  And with Tanya’s car, I don’t have to carry all the wine back in my backpack (though I still have to carry it up three long flights of stairs).  😄

The other day, we did our bi-weekly shopping, wearing masks and taking other precautions.  Everyone was wearing masks, but also the store was not crowded, it was a weekday morning.  And I swear Petropavlovsk has more food shops per capita than any place I know, from small kiosks to giant supermarkets, so I have rarely seen a store crowded.

We are shopping at this store now -- big and uncrowded.

Onions were a “crucial” need – I use them (cooked) in almost all my recipes, and I had only one small one left.  And I also wanted potatoes.  Both bins seemed to have substandard products. I searched for decent potatoes, not too wrinkly, and for "ok" onions, not too soft.  I thought the quality was not great because they were just down on their supplies. Only later did I realize I was shopping the low-cost “seconds” bins, clearly meant for rapid use, rather than a stock-up of supplies.  If I could have read the labels/details….  

Jody's borsch (борщ) (thick!)

Shoppers bag their own produce, weigh it on a machine that produces the label to stick on.  So I didn’t think I should reject the produce I had already handled, packaged and labeled.  But once home, after a couple days in the plastic bag (mistake) in a closet (dark, not very cool), my onions were oozy. I had to throw one away and salvage from the rest.  

The potatoes also were iffy.  So I made a potato-onion frittata (pictured above) and borsch (борщ).  And with the rest of the onions I’m working on sauces for pasta or rice or grechka.

Lost in Translation part 2

While food shopping has a lot of “what you see is what you get,” shopping for non-food items in opaque plastic bottles can be a real challenge.  The winter of 2011 I spent in Japan, where I realized this challenge big time.  I remember standing in front of shelves of plastic bottles in the 100-yen store, asking myself, “Is this shampoo? Dish soap? Conditioner? Hand soap? Furniture polish?”  If only each bottle had a picture of the object of its contents, but … they didn’t in most cases!

After half an hour or so without being able to read a bit of Japanese, I finally picked one I thought was dish soap.  I showed it later to my host and colleague, Yuichiro, asking him, “Is this dish soap?” – and was I triumphant that he said it was! Small triumph.

Looks innocent enough for soap...

So back to this year and month, April 2020. On our prior shopping trip, I told Tanya I needed laundry soap was on my list. I was using up the one that had been left in the flat where I am staying. It was hypoallergenic and essentially unscented, and that’s what I wanted more of. We went to the laundry aisle and Tanya pointed out an appropriate liquid soap.

I said, “Well, THIS (other one) is the one I have been using,” and she responded, “Jody, that’s CONDITIONER!”

Here, in the "fine" but bold print....

The front of the bottle does NOT say that. It says (and I could read the Cyrillic), “gipoallergennii,” “superkoncentrat,” and “detskii” (children) (and that's it's been tested).  On the side it just gave recommended amounts to use.

OK -- so now that I knew my mistake, I looked again on the back and found, about 3/4's of the way down, and after a lot of other languages, that [RU] the label does use the word “konditsioner” in larger than the minimum (but still small) size.  And ok -- so I did laundry for a month using laundry conditioner in the washing machine instead of laundry soap.  [In the flat there was/had been some powdered soap, but it was scented, and I don’t like scented soaps.] Maybe my clothes were not so clean, but they were soft!

On our most recent shopping trip, after being traumatized (not) by that experience, this time I was looking for an all-purpose cleaner for the kitchen and bath.  Even though the one I picked out had a picture of a tub and of a stove-top, I still went and checked with Tanya that it was the right thing.  After all, “Mr. Proper” could have been advertising a depilatory.

Postscript in my defense

When Tanya told the conditioner story in Russian to our friend and colleague Sasha, at the end he seemed confused and did not laugh. Instead he asked, “What is konditsioner?” This response tells me that “konditsioner” 1) is not a Russian word, 2) is a post-Soviet, capitalistic bourgeois product, and that 3) therefore I should not have expected to find it in a typical flat in a typical Soviet Khrushchyovka*.  [With apologies to Vera Ponomareva and Sasha Lander].

*Khrushchyovka (Russian: хрущёвка, IPA: [xrʊˈɕːɵfkə]) is an unofficial name of a type of low-cost, concrete-paneled or brick three- to five-storied apartment building which was developed in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, during the time its namesake Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet government. [Wikipedia]